em to my French relations...I'm thankful to say I
don't pretend to understand them myself! But YOU'RE an Everard--I told
Anna last spring in London that one sees that instantly"...

She wandered off to the cooking and the service of the hotel at Ouchy.
She attached great importance to gastronomic details and to the manners
of hotel servants. There, too, there was a falling off, she said. "I don
t know, of course; but people say it's owing to the Americans. Certainly
my waiter had a way of slapping down the dishes...they tell me that many
of them are Anarchists...belong to Unions, you know." She appealed
to Darrow's reported knowledge of economic conditions to confirm this
ominous rumour.

After dinner Owen Leath wandered into the next room, where the piano
stood, and began to play among the shadows. His step-mother presently
joined him, and Darrow sat alone with Madame de Chantelle.

She took up the thread of her mild chat and carried it on at the
same pace as her knitting. Her conversation resembled the large
loose-stranded web between her fingers: now and then she dropped a
stitch, and went on regardless of the gap in the pattern.

Darrow listened with a lazy sense of well-being. In the mental lull of
the after-dinner hour, with harmonious memories murmuring through
his mind, and the soft tints and shadowy spaces of the fine old room
charming his eyes to indolence, Madame de Chantelle's discourse seemed
not out of place. He could understand that, in the long run, the
atmosphere of Givre might be suffocating; but in his present mood its
very limitations had a grace.

Presently he found the chance to say a word in his own behalf; and
thereupon measured the advantage, never before particularly apparent to
him, of being related to the Everards of Albany. Madame de Chantelle's
conception of her native country--to which she had not returned since
her twentieth year--reminded him of an ancient geographer's map of the
Hyperborean regions. It was all a foggy blank, from which only one or
two fixed outlines emerged; and one of these belonged to the Everards of
Albany.

The fact that they offered such firm footing--formed, so to speak,
a friendly territory on which the opposing powers could meet and
treat--helped him through the task of explaining and justifying himself
as the successor of Fraser Leath. Madame de Chantelle could not resist
such incontestable claims. She seemed to feel her son's hovering and
discriminating